Brothers from Another Mother: Climate Deniers – meet Flat Earthers

December 4, 2017

Do your own research, snowflake.

NASA lies!

Description:

Conspiracy theories are nothing new, but in the age of the internet, they spread like “chemtrails” in the wind. The theory that the world is flat, for example, gained so much popularity online that this year 500 people gathered for the first ever International Flat Earth Conference. The belief that the world is flat has kind of been around forever, but it picked up steam in 2015 with a rash of online communities, YouTube videos, podcasts, and even songs preaching the gospel. At some point, Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics started talking about it too, which really seemed to blow the lid off the heliocentric model. So, the time was right for the Flat Earth International Conference, the first of its kind, held at the beginning of November outside of Raleigh, NC. Sold out since May, the conference brought together hundreds of people who had before only really interacted online. It was an opportunity for believers to network, share research, meet thought leaders, find a flat-earth compatible mate, show off various NASA parody t-shirts, and talk shit about Neil deGrasse Tyson. VICE News was there for it all. As one attendee told us, “it gets pretty deep.” We’ll let you be the judge.

As Quine pointed out, any belief can be defended come what may so long as you’re willing to make whatever adjustments are required elsewhere in the ‘web of belief’. But that approach depends on treating belief as purely theoretical–which it isn’t. We use beliefs (and other forms of cognitive commitments) to guide actions, anticipate their likely consequences and generally manage our lives. I think the trouble here is that these people don’t have to navigate, don’t have to plan satellite launches or deal with radio signals and how that propagate: in general they don’t have to do anything practical at all that depends on having a workable model of the shape of the earth. The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for most climate deniers. At that point ‘belief’ flies free of the constraints that make what you believe matter in a practical– it becomes a ritualistic expression of some kind of community bond, a ‘special’ identity or what have you. Of course this makes rational belief something like motivated cognition– but the right motives are essential (reliability of the belief in applications where its content guides what we do and the upshot depends on its content being a reliable basis for action, rather than as a part of social ritual and allegiance or manipulation of others). In other words, we need to adopt a pragmatic perspective to see what’s going wrong here.